In My End Is My Beginning
by EchidnaHazard
Summary: Nny finally says goodbye to an old friend; is the seperation more than his frail psyche can take?


In My End Is My Beginning  
  
By Echidna-Hazard  
  
The rain forms a misty, chilly curtain against the rest of the world, beating down with freezing fury on my head and shoulders as I walk through the abode of the dead.  
  
The path I slowly trudge along is well-kept, no stray bits of grass poke up from the gray bricks, and they are not worn by many feet.  
  
In my hands I clutch to me, with all the stubbornness of a mother, a small cardboard shoebox. It won't hold up well against the storm, I know, but it was all I had.  
  
I've come here to end it... to bury a friend who's been dead for a while already. Letting go; it's going to be really hard, but I keep my promises.  
  
I'm the only silent mourner in two acres of burial site--the rain must have chased the others off, and even if it were sunny, nobody would mourn with me. Nobody knows the friend I've lost.  
  
The almost always present voice of reason and comfort... my friend for three long years of pain. Though it wasn't all bad, I suppose.  
  
I gaze down at the box, the corners well worn and the top unprotected. I promised myself I wouldn't open it; that it'd be hard enough without seeing him again, but I'm drawn by the urge that perhaps he's not really gone after all, maybe he was just sleeping for that year. Maybe his voice will come back to me.  
  
My trembling fingers move to the lid, but another of my voices whispers, "Don't. He won't come back."  
  
I'm already halfway there, the lid slides away and I look down at the motionless body and head of my only pet, my most loyal friend. The nail that gave him his name is still stick in his chest: he'd look naked without it.  
  
"Nailbunny." I say aloud, and my voice trembles a little.  
  
There is no response, the rabbit is mute. He's been that way for over a year, but I always held out hope that he'd come back someday. He kept me sane and safe...and what was his reward? Another year of hanging nailed to my wall while I waited for him to return to himself, and then a burial in an Adidas shoebox in the middle of sub-zero rain.  
  
I'd done the best I could with his body, it was duct-taped back to his head, but he looked a bit like Frankenstein. Not the best way to go... but not the worst, either.  
  
"I guess this is goodbye." I whisper, the loudest I can manage, closing the lid anew on my impaled pet. Had either of us fathomed it ending this way? -- He might have, but he never said he'd leave me. Maybe it wasn't his choice... maybe he fought as hard as he could to stay. Or maybe he succumbed peacefully to the demons who took him from me. I'll never really know for sure.  
  
I'd like to imagine how he went out fighting--not that rabbits are really good fighters to begin with.  
  
I used to think we were inseparable; you couldn't have Nailbunny without Nny, and vice-versa. In a way it was true. He was me, my inner voice of reason taken dead rabbit form. But when he left, when he stopped talking, the loss was incredible. Even though it was a part of me, and I shouldn't have missed it that much, it hurt as much as any physical wound.  
  
And no amount of violence, crying or threats could bring him back. It was a wound in my soul that I'd have to live with, just like all the others.  
  
"It's time to go now." Murmured another of my countless voices: this one was nameless.  
  
I know the voice is right. I'm soaked through to the bone, and my hands are beginning to numb on the box. Nailbunny wouldn't want me to get hypothermia, or pneumonia.  
  
I set the box down for a moment, and fumble in my coat for a match. It won't burn well in the rain, I know, but there's a wind blowing it away slightly, so I can shield it.  
  
After a few attempts the match flares to life and I drop it on the box, crouching down batlike over it. The warmth flares up in my face, beginning to dry my dripping hair as fast as the rain re-soaks it.  
  
I want to say something, a poem or a quote or a song, but my mind is blank. I can only stare at the embers the fire lets float to the ground, where they extinguish in the rivulets of water trapped between the cracks of the sidewalk.  
  
Finally, words come.  
  
"We are gathered here today..." My voice is strangled by emotion, and my face is wet with more than rain, "To mourn the passing of a good friend, a caring and dedicated soul... Nailbunny."  
  
Thunder roars, drowning out my last few words, but I know he's heard them  
  
"May he rest in peace."  
  
Now nothing will come, only throat-closing grief, ripping agony, only the pain. Always, the pain.  
  
I leave the mass of wet ashes and a charred nail on the bricks and slowly walk away, back out into the storm and into the cold, unfeeling world.  
  
Behind me, a small baby rabbit, his distance kept by the fire, sniffs the cooling ashes, then lopes after me, hoping for food and shelter. 


End file.
